Just when she thinks she’s home and dry, high-flying Rebecca Moore comes back to earth

I recently spent too long in the air on an 11-hour flight to San Francisco. I was alone, pasty-faced and miserable.

Long-haul flights are never fun. The end result may be awesome, but the getting there is horrendous.

I mean, it doesn’t rank alongside gastric band surgery (I imagine) and I realise the fact that I’m lucky to be in a position to get on a plane to fly miraculously through the sky in order to go on a mind-altering trip compared with plenty of people in this world (thanks, Band Aid for reminding me... again) But still: breathing recycled germs and squinting at reruns of Friends on a phone-sized screen while the fat guy in front bends his head lower into my lap is NOT my idea of a fun time.

It doesn’t matter how many precautions you take, how much face spray you spritz nor how much medication you dose up with: flying long-haul is dire.

You step off that plane feeling hungover, pasty and fat, despite the fact that you scarcely ate anything because everything was awful. This time, I arrived back at Heathrow very worse for wear having spent the night before the flight in a sake bar in Japantown, singing karaoke and remembering what being “blind drunk” is.

It was a brilliant, wondrous night, followed by the worse 11 hours of my life.

Then we began the slow approach into Heathrow.

It’s OK, I naively sighed, I’ll be home in Oxford soon.

But as I boarded the coach and we bounced along to join the M25 word came across the tannoy that all was not well in London Orbital Land. Of course it wasn’t. There were three lanes of traffic and not one of them was moving. I whipped my phone out to check the state of play.

An earlier accident was delaying traffic for up to two hours.

Now, I recognise that my first thought should naturally have been ‘oh gosh, I hope everyone involved is OK’, but honestly it wasn’t.

That thought came about five minutes later, once I’d cooled down.

My immediate thought was an expletive. My second thought was something about inconsiderate drivers, crashing everywhere.

My third thought was ‘groan’.

I don’t know about you but I’m sick and tired (and I nearly was very sick) with the traffic coming in and out of Oxford.

We broke free from the M25 and moved freely along the M40... until we entered Headington. Then the fun really began.

It took nearly an hour from the Headington roundabout on to the High Street by which point I was livid and huffing loud enough for people to hear.

I wasn’t even huffing at anyone at particular – that guy crossing the street and (probably, somehow) slowing us down; the woman struggling (bless her) to get off the coach and definitely slowing us down; the pigeon in the sky that could so freely fly forcing the downdraft of its flapping wings to slow us down.

I may have reached insanity by this point.

But that’s what driving in Oxford does to you. Get me back on my bicycle.

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